The controversial militia group Oath Keepers wants to train students to "fight back" at every college in the nation, saying it will offer training "with and without arms" in the wake of recent deadly massacres on campuses around the nation.
The Students Taking Over Protection program will start in Oregon, where
nine people died at Umpqua Community College in the latest slaughter, the
group announced on its website.
"Just as post 9/11, where people no longer submit and cooperate in their own murders on planes, the obvious answer to school shootings on college and high school campuses is that the students must stop submitting and cooperating in their own murders," Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and media director Jason Van Tatenhove wrote on the website.
"They must fight back, and we will show them how."
According to the pair, military, police, and first-responder instructors will teach the students to fight back with empty hands, improvised weapons, knives, and firearms, and will teach them effective combat mindset and awareness techniques and strategies so the students can be their own "'first responders' and take out an active shooter."
They also decry that students "have been conditioned since grade school to be passive, submissive and 'non-violent' — taught that violence is 'never the answer.'"
"[S]ometimes violence is the only answer," the pair wrote.
In an interview with Red List News, the men described the STOP program in more detail, warning that anti-bullying programs in schools are "brainwashing children" into being "docile."
"Whether it's an active shooter that kills them, or later on a death camp somewhere down the road because they've been conditioned never to fight back," Van Tatenhove warns in the interview. "It only leads to death."
Oath Keepers was formed by Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate, in 2004 and now claims more than 30,000 members, mostly former military, police and first responders,
the Washington Times reports.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has criticized the group's "radical politics."